Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Italian Technical Schools
The new Italian technical secondary school curriculum, active from the 2010-2011 academic school year, is founded on the principle of equivalent training in the various courses thereby improving the different learning styles of students while simultaneously giving a complex response to the demands of the employment market. The different vocational education and training courses aim at increasing the value of the diverse inclinations of pupils, consequently helping to prevent low pupil motivation and drop out, and, likewise, ensuring the possibility of gaining a solid cultural background in order to become conscientious, active and responsabile citizens.
The renewed attention to technical education is consequently based on the decisive role of schools and culture in our society for the development of the person and also for economic and social progress. This means overcoming the past deeply-rooted cultural concept based on the primary and central importance of theoretical knowledge as opposed to practical know-how.
As in the past, technical secondary schools have helped to provide for the managerial and executive branches of the national productive system and, likewise, today their contribution is fundamental in an era of scientific and technological progress which demands intellectual ability with increasingly specific specialisations, above all in a country like Italy that has a strong manufacturing vocation.
The new demands for technical schools are, on the one hand, pupil acquisition of the necessary competences for the employment market, and on the other the ability to comprehend and apply the innovations produced by the continuous development of science and technology.
In order to become true "innovatory schools", technical secondary schools are called upon to make decisions aiming at long-lasting change while simultaneously fostering self-learning abilities, group work and continuous training. Special thought on science along with its achievements and limits, its historical evolution and its relationship with technology is, consequently, fundamental in all technical high school courses. Briefly speaking, improving scientific method and technological knowledge is fundamental inasmuch as they accustom to discipline, intellectual honesty, freedom of thought, creativity, cooperation, all key factors in an open and democratic society.
Within this context, focused on achieving the necessary competences for the employment market, the curricula retain their specificity and their pupil learning objectives but with a coherent teaching methodology based on a technical schooling outlook capable of achieving active pupil involvement and motivation. Implementation of inductive methods, participatory hands-on methodologies, intense and widespread laboratory teaching in all subjects through ICT are called for, as are project activity and school-workplace collaboration in order to develop connections with the background territory and its educational resources in business and social contexts.
Considering technological secondary schools as "innovatory schools" means viewing them as laboratories for building and shaping the future, capable of transmitting the fascination of the imagination, curiosity and research experience to team builders of products for the future, that is to say future conscientious students whose own individual, special and professional commitment aims at personal, cultural and social success. In an increasingly complex world, imagination is that extra-added value that can create something new, personal and meaningful to one's life in a just and united society.
